[ISEA2024] Paper: Louise Curham — Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: Methods for Media Art Preservation

Abstract

Keywords: Media art preservation, time-based art preservation, archival practice, preservation, DNA storage, manual making, expanded cinema, re-enactment, media art history.

This paper discusses a novel approach to media art preservation led by Australian artist-archivist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, using the field of expanded cinema as a case study.1 Works of 1970s expanded cinema (which combine celluloid film projection with live performance) are typical of the inherent “lossiness” of much 20th and 21st century media art.2 While offering richly embodied experiences in their moment of enactment, expanded cinema’s ephemerality means that it risks falling out of circulation and thus becoming unavailable for future experience. Teaching and Learning Cinema, over the past 20 years, has evolved a methodology for preserving works of expanded cinema, featuring three overlapping approaches. First, intergenerational transfer is attempted: in this phase, younger artists learn about the work from its originators, and produce live re-enactments. During the second phase, a users manual is assembled, encoding the artwork as a set of instructions with the intention of making it available for future generations of performers and audiences. Thirdly, the archived material from phases one and two is stored on synthetic DNA, with a view to transmission into the deep future (perhaps 1000 years). While the first two phases are urgent, preventing the work’s immediate extinction, the third phase is speculative, broadening the enquiry to explore the question of cultural heritage across much longer timeframes.

  • Dr Louise Curham is an online lecturer in Curtin University’s iSchool (AU), teaching into archives, records and digital preservation. Louise uses her art and her expertise as an archivist to research themes that flow from old media from digitisation to the impacts of algorithms on citizens.
  • Dr Lucas Ihlein is an artist, and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Arts at University of Wollongong (AU). With Dr Louise Curham he is a member of artist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, which conducts re-enactments of expanded cinema performances. He is also a student at Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation.
  • Dr. Raja Appuswamy is an Assistant Professor in the Data Science department at EURECOM (France) where he leads the Data Systems research group. His research focuses on developing novel processing and storage technologies to enable real-time analytics and long-term archival of Big Data in several application domains.